So I'm a linux user, and as a user that can see what you've done wrong and not googled, I need to fix some s*** here with a comment and I hope you edit the article because of it.
Steam didn't crash. Packaged in with steam, which is a ubuntu 12.04 based app by the way, are some driver hooks that look for, either, the old radeon open source driver, or catalyst 12.1/13.3. As of now, we have AMDGPU packaged in the linux kernel that basically takes any modern card, 250X and up, and says "Hey, remember that one time you played video games and your graphics card wasn't s***, and now it is on windows? Yeah forget that, now it works like it should." Its great, and personally I spent a lot of time patching problems for the R7 370 on it. However, steam hasn't been updated in an eternity, so steam still pulls for those hooks. Theres 2 ways to fix this:
A: You follow a copy paste guide I made 2 or 3 years ago to fix this, linked here:
www dot gamersonlinux dot com/forum/threads/steam-drivers-what.1293/
or B: use the "Steam Installer" snap in the ubuntu software center. Not only has the community built this to be up to date, and self updates, but all of these stupid hooks have been torn out and built to work with modern NVidia drivers and Radeon drivers.
Now why are these hooks there? Hardware survey. Thats literally all they do. Fucking useless. And annoying at that.
Now what you should have specified was if you used Wayland or X11. Depending on the display server, Wayland coulda done all sorts of weird s***, but X would have been completely fine I bet.
I see this review noted all over linux forums and they condemn this laptop as trash.
Please, PLEASE, edit this review and feel free to email me if you need help. Or ask on IRC about stuff. Anything to get this review that is not set up correctly in the first place, just so the bad stigma of this really cool machine can be fixed.